PLAYOFF PREVIEW! part 2

So it's a couple of days late. Sue me.

Here's our preview for the Eastern Conference playoffs openning round! Today's extremely useless stat will be the shooting percentage of your top goal scorer! By looking at the shooting percentage of the top goal scorer on each team, I will magically predict who is going to win each series!

Let's look at the match-ups.

1. Buffalo Sabres (Thomas Vanek, 18.1%) vs. New York Islanders (Jason Blake, 13.1%). Not even the potential return of Ricky D is enough to save the Islanders in this series. Five percentage points higher is just as good as a sweep in my book, Sabres in four.

2. New Jersey (Zach Parise, 12.6%) vs. Tampa Bay (Vincent Lecavlier, 15.3%). Based on my extremely unscientific thought process, it looks like Tampa Bay will come back from their opening round loss and over take the Devils. Bolts in 6.

3. Atlanta Thrashers (Marian Hossa, 12.6%) vs. New York Rangers (Jaromir Jagr, 9.3%). 9.3%?!?!? How many millions of shots did he take? With Jagr playing like his old self (his self of 4 years ago, not his self of 12 years ago), it looks like Atlanta should be ok in the long haul of this series. Atlanta in 7.

4. Ottawa Senators (Dany Heatley, 16.1%) vs. Pittsburgh Penguins (Sidney Crosby, 14.4%). Secondary Sid doesn't have a terribly bad shooting percentage. Maybe he should shoot the puck more. Of course, I'm guessing if he did that, then his critics (people like me), would yell at him for shooting too much and not passing more. It's a hard knock life for Crosby. Senators in five.

Well, that's it for this round, it looks like some teams will wake up and come back, while other teams won't. Some teams of course, are just destined to be hated by me, but hey, I was pretty nice this time around.

I'm now off to offer congratulations to the Hershey Bears and their first division title in 13 years, not to mention clinching the best record in the AHL. LET'S GO BEARS! Oh yeah, and NHL stuff too. We've got games starting in a few hours!